Best laptops for photo editing: Retina is important, but it’s not everything

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Photo editing pushes laptop capabilities right to the very edge. Top-quality work demands a high-resolution, color-accurate display, and a fast processor. But the rigors of traveling with photo gear plus a computer make small, lightweight machines with long battery lives a real plus. Similarly, storing thousands of high-resolutions calls for a large hard drive, while peak performance is only possible with an SSD. As a result, there is no single, perfect laptop for all photographers, but I’ve picked out some of the models that stand out from the competition for both pros and hobbyists alike.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of the best laptops for photo editing, but if you are in the market one of these will almost certainly suit your needs.

Apple Macbook Pro 15-inch with Retina display

For photographers, the best reason to consider a Mac laptop is that you’ll get one of the best displays available in a well-built chassis. Unlike other brands that are always fiddling with their display quality and suppliers — making comparison shopping difficult — Apple has been relentless about improving the color gamut and fidelity of its laptop displays, while improving resolution. The Macbook Pro’s Retina display is as good as it gets for looking at and editing photos.

A combination of top-notch display, excellent build quality, solid performance and OS X make the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display the most popular laptop among professional photographers by a wide margin.

The quad-core Intel Core i7 featured in the 15-inch model provides plenty of horsepower for editing, and the integrated SSD does the same for the OS. Those who can afford the nearly $3000 price tag will love the higher end model with its 2.7GHz CPU and 16GB of RAM. Perhaps the only downside is that the SSD — at a maximum of 512GB — may not be large enough for all your images, so expect to have to add an external hard drive for large projects. Many pros who use the MBP travel with a pair of Thunderbolt external hard drives, one for storing images and another as a backup.

If portability is a priority, then the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is also excellent, but editing tools like Photoshop and Lightroom will be fairly cramped on the smaller display.

Dell XPS 15

My XPS 15 is the first machine I’ve ever bought from Dell. Having used it all over the world for 18 months as a professional photographer and tech journalist, I’ve become a big fan. The XPS 15’s 15.6-inch screen is gorgeous — at 1080p the WLED is not as high resolution as the new Macbook Pro models — but delivers excellent color, especially once you calibrate it. The quad-core Core i7 chip and Nvidia graphics card chew through large image editing projects almost like a desktop. I souped my XPS 15 up with 16GB of RAM and replaced the default optical drive with a DIY SSD. That gives me both the speed of an SSD for the OS and image cache, combined with a 1TB hard drive for my image storage.

The Achilles heel of the both mine (Sandy Bridge) and the current XPS 15 model (Ivy Bridge) is battery life. If you are hoping to use the machine without a plug for extended periods, you’ll want to wait Haswell. In the meantime, the machine has plenty of connectivity options, including three USB 3.0 ports. For video it has HDMI and mini DisplayPort. However, Dell has dropped the VGA connector, so make sure and carry an adapter if you do a lot of presentations on legacy projectors.

The Dell has also got great sound, so good that I often don’t carry my portable speakers for when I do slideshows in small venues. The backlit keyboard is a joy to type on, and the machine has been rock solid. I’ve got Windows 8.1 on it now, but so far at least the XPS 15 isn’t available with a touch screen, so keyboard and mouse are it. If you’re not hung up on buying a Mac, the Dell XPS 15 is a very similar machine for a much lower price — although at 5.8 pounds, it is over a pound heavier.

Sony Vaio Pro 13 touch ultrabook

If you don’t need a 15-inch screen or a huge hard drive, the Sony Vaio Pro 13 is an amazingly lightweight powerhouse. Packing a Core i7 CPU and beautiful 1080p Triluminos display into a sleek 2.34 pound carbon-fiber frame, the unit combines just about everything possible into such small dimensions. The touchscreen is bundled with ArtRage for those planning mixed media creations.

Aside from the screen size, the biggest limitation on the Vaio Pro is RAM. It maxes out at just 8GB. That’s plenty for most photography projects, but not enough if you expect to crunch huge Photoshop images with high resolution and lots of layers. It also doesn’t offer discrete graphics, so the built-in Intel HD 4400 graphics will need to be enough for you. The Core i7 CPU also means that the Vaio Pro 13 has more fan noise than some other lower-power ultrabooks.

For those who need to travel light and prefer OS X, the MacBook Air is the obvious choice — with the 13-inch model offering a large enough screen to do some reasonable photo work.

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Dozerman

With a lot of software vendors moving to GPGPU (such as Adobe’s moves recently to accelerate PS and GPU centric software like Musemage), would an AMD ultrathin with Richland (or soon, Kaveri) be able to keep up with these laptops?

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

I’m not nearly as familiar with the AMD offerings, so maybe someone else can chime in, but I’d think a Richland chip would do similarly to the integrated Intel graphics on the Core processor line.

Dozerman

I didn’t think Intel supported OpenCL on their GPUs, though if that’s the case the Intel chips would be able to pull ahead with or without OpenCL, which would make decisions a lot simpler.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

I think Intel has been adding OpenCL support with driver revs over time.

Dozerman

The last I heard of that was that they were supporting CPU implementations, but not GPU, although that was awhile back.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

There are a lot of articles on the web that have started to benchmark OpenCL running on the GPU of the HD configured chips, so I think that’s a good sign!

Dozerman

Absolutely good news. History is repeating itself with AMD forcing Intel’s hand in new tech. At this point, I am wondering how long until they begin supporting HSA like tech and possibly even HSAIL itself. As usual, though, in three or four years, Intel will have a faster GPGPU implementation (unless something major happens.) It’s sad, really.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

Two anecdotes apropos that point:

In the 1980s at Sun we offered both SPARC and x86 computers. We were having dinner with Intel execs that supplied us the x86 chips and asked what we could do to get better pricing. They said “Sell more SPARC” Intel has definitely always reacted to competition. Barring that, they charge what the market will bear.

Second is recently at IDF. The Intel execs were very, very vocal about how with Baytrail they would compete for every deal. Clearly ARM has finally made its presence known. Agree that it is kind of a shame that Intel can simply “absorb” innovation through its massive business and core tech strength.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

There are a lot of articles on the web that have started to benchmark OpenCL running on the GPU of the HD configured chips, so I think that’s a good sign!

JD Rahman

How can you write about laptops for photo editing and miss the color matching and calibration optimized models?

Interesting point, though we know that David calibrates his own displays (as he noted in the article).

Also, I’d note that some features simply aren’t worth it. Better to do the best you can when on-the-go and then leave the really high-end equipment — color calibration, etc — for your external monitor. For example, the color sensor in the Lenovo W530 is a $200 upgrade and believe it’s rather limited. (I haven’t used it since that feature was first rolled out.)

VirtualMark

Yeah, some info on contrast ratios, brightness, colour gamut etc for the models mentioned in the article would have been good too.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

Yes, agree that would be a good addition and something we can work on for future revisions. For now, I was worried about getting into specific specs on displays for the PC models mentioned for the reason I gave in the article — PC vendors have a tendency to swap components (for good or bad) mid-model, so it is very hard to keep anything like that accurate.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

JD — Good point, but to be honest I had trouble sorting out the current status of DreamColor and PremierColor on laptops. I use Dell PremierColor displays in my studio and love them, but after several years of offering (and marketing) PremierColor on several laptop models, Dell’s site seems strangely silent about it in its description of the newer versions of those models. The HP situation is somewhat similar. Certainly though the Dell M6700 (which I think is still offered with PremierColor) would be a good entry in the large-size desktop-replacement category.

VirtualMark

The XPS 15 isn’t a great laptop, I’ve been looking at these as I wanted to buy one but was put off by the reviews. They have wifi connection issues that appear to be related to the chassis design. They have a small battery and short battery life and a weak graphics card. Plus I wanted a backlit keyboard, they dropped that option a while back.

I’m hoping that Dell release a newer version with a Haswell CPU that also addresses the above issues. The MBP needs some competition.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

Sounds like Dell has made some unfortunate choices since I got mine. The one I have has a backlit keyboard and has never had any WiFi issues. nVidia graphics are also quick responsive. Agree that we can hope that the Haswell one leaps forward again, as it has the potential to keep the MBP honest!

VirtualMark

Yeah it’s only got 3.5/5 stars on Dell’s own site at the moment, there’s a lot of annoyed customers. They upgraded the wireless card to the Killer Wireless-N a while back and also upgraded the 630m to a 640m. I don’t know if that’s a good idea though, I’ve also read about throttling issues on this model, probably due to the slim design. Apparently it only happens when both the CPU and GPU are stressed.

I think I’m going to wait for the Haswell model, I’d imagine they’ll update it sometime. Plus the MBP should be refreshed soon too, it’ll be good to see how they compare.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

This kind of links back to Joel’s article on why buying a Windows laptop is so messed up. These vendors fiddle with models, often just to cut corners and make a few more bucks or improve one particular characteristic, without really thinking through the changes. They also rebadge them in all sorts of confusing ways. By the time the market can actually sort out what’s happening, it’s changed again.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

VM — Saw the newest XPS 15 at a press event last night. Backlit keyboard is back, unit looks nice, but I didn’t have time to actually play with it. Screen they had on the display unit was some monster resolution.

VirtualMark

Yeah I’ve seen it, it looks very nice! It’s not on the UK Dell site yet though, I’m keen to see what the prices are like.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

The Dell rep started to go into pricing, but I didn’t have enough time to sort it out (since of course screen rez, etc., all matter a lot). However, none of the numbers were small:-)

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

The Dell rep started to go into pricing, but I didn’t have enough time to sort it out (since of course screen rez, etc., all matter a lot). However, none of the numbers were small:-)

VirtualMark

Yeah I’ve seen it, it looks very nice! It’s not on the UK Dell site yet though, I’m keen to see what the prices are like.

Osymandias

I still use a late 2009 plastic macbook for photo editing purpose. Runs adobe photoshop CS6 and LR 4.xx almost flawlessly!

David, one important spec to include is the bit LUT for these screens.

http://www.gajindustrialsupply.com/ Henry James

For photo editing, laptop with a high resolution screen will work best. The Macbook Pro Retina will be an obvious choice for photographers. It has more than five million pixels on the 15-inch model. http://www.wowapic.com/

Jason Hops

The program of Diversity will continue until the last White child is gone

Tricia Etchels

I have just purchased the Mac Pro 15″ with retina display, I see that the review said works well with photoshop can you tell me if this is the case for photoshop elements 12? As I have read that the PSE 12 is not great on the retina display screen very pixelated. If this is correct what would you recommend to use on my Mac Pro? I am using purely for a hobby not professional work

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